Manager not responding!

[riltis]

We have a rendering farm with eight computers in it. Our platform is XP, Max 5.1 and VRAY 1.09. We are finding that when we send any intensive rendering our machines will work for 2-4 hours and then post an err message stating manager is not responding..Then the server will drop the job, find the manager and restart the job. Does anyone out there have any ideas what this could be? Here are a few things that I have tried with no success.

1. Upgraded to windows server (thought we had hit the client access limit)
2. All machines have a dedicated IP
3. Defraged all the machines

[DanielBrew]

riltis, are you rendering on the manager machine, I had similar problems problems under Max3.1. It seemed to be caused by the manager machine being too busy rendering to respond to requests from the servers but I was never sure.

Dan

[riltis]

Manager not responding

No the manager is on the file server which doesn't render. I have tried moving the manager around to diffrent computers with no success.

[jacksc02]

riltis - make sure things like screensavers are turned off and that your power settings are set to always on.

Chris Jackson
cj@arcad.co.nz

[DanielBrew]

Can you ping the manager machine from the server immediately after the error saying the manager is not responding? I seem to remember the manager not responding to ping requests. This made me think the problem was more likely Windows/network related than specific to Max.

[riltis]

Manager Not Responding

jacksc02: I have all power related and screensaver stuff turned off

damielbrew- It is difficult to try to ping the machine because it takes it 3-5 hours to drop and when it does it says Manager not responding and then it finds the manager again....strange!

What network setup is everybody using...domain based...or workgroup based?

[DanielBrew]

Ours is domain based and was domain based when I had the manager problem.

[riltis]

Manager Not Responding

Ours is Workgroup based....We are starting to upgrade our machines with hopes to solve the problems...if you have any other ideas please let me know!

[DanielBrew]

I have spoken to our IT manager and he said that around the time we stopped having network rendering problem we changed all the hubs on the network to managed switches (he says this would improve network performance).

Sounds a bit drastic and I don't know if that was what solved it.

Good luck.

[riltis]

Manager Not responding

We are running a linksys switch and a linksys router. We are still in the process of upgrading our systems to max 6...I will let you know if the problem gets resolved.